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Javier E

Why Gen Z College Students Are Seeking Tech and Finance Jobs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-z-college-students-jobs.html

Gen Z college students tech finance jobs money career selling out

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Harvard, where, at a wood-paneled dining hall last year, two juniors explained how to assess a fellow undergraduate’s earning potential. It’s easy, they said, as we ate mussels, beets and sautéed chard: You can tell by who’s getting a bulge bracket internship.
  • A bulge bracket bank, like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or Citi. The biggest, most prestigious global investment banks
  • Not to be confused with M.B.B., which stands for three of the most prestigious management consulting firms: McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • Even when they arrive at college wanting something very different, an increasing number of students at elite universities seek the imprimatur of employment by a powerful firm and “making a bag” (slang for a sack of money) as quickly as possible.
  • Elite universities have always been major feeders into finance and consulting, and students have always wanted to make money. According to the annual American Freshman Survey, the biggest increase in students wanting to become “very well off financially” happened between the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s been creeping up since then.
  • According to a Harvard Crimson survey of Harvard Seniors, the share of 2024 graduates going into finance and consulting is 34 percent. (In 2022 and 2023 it exceeded 40 percent.
  • Another student, from Uruguay, who spent his second summer in a row practicing case studies in preparation for management consulting internship interviews, told me that everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money. Someone else told me it was common at parties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.
  • “There’s definitely a herd mentality,” Joshua Parker, a 21-year-old Harvard junior from Oahu, said. “If you’re not doing finance or tech, it can feel like you’re doing something wrong.”
  • As a freshman, he planned to major in environmental engineering. As a sophomore, he switched to economics, joining five of his six roommates. One of those roommates told me that he hoped to run a hedge fund by the time he was in his 30s. Before that, he wanted to earn a good salary, which he defined as $500,000 a year.
  • But in the last five years, faculty and administrators say, the pull of these industries has become supercharged. In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition and inequality, students and their parents increasingly see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.
  • These statistics approach the previous highs in 2007, after which the global financial crisis drove the share down to a recent low of 20 percent in 2009, from which it’s been regaining ground since
  • Fifteen years ago, fewer students went into tech. Adding in that sector, the share of graduates starting what some students non-disparagingly refer to as “sellout jobs” is more than half. (It was a record-shattering 60 percent in 2022 and nearly 54 percent in 2023.)
  • “When people say ‘selling out,’ I mean, obviously, there’s some implicit judgment there,” said Aden Barton, a 23-year-old Harvard senior who wrote an opinion column for the student newspaper headlined, “How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom.”
  • “But it really is just almost a descriptive term at this point for people pursuing certain career paths,” he continued. “I’m not trying to denigrate anybody’s career path nor my own.” (He interned at a hedge fund last summer.)
  • David Halek, director of employer relations at Yale’s Office of Career Strategy, thinks students may use the term “sell out” because of the perceived certainty: “It’s the easy path to follow. It is well defined,” he said.
  • “It’s hard to conceptualize other things,” said Andy Wang, a social studies concentrator at Harvard who recently graduated.
  • Some students talk about turning to a different career later on, after they’ve made enough money. “Nowadays, English concentrators often say they’re going into finance or management consulting for a couple of years before writing their novel,” said James Wood, a Harvard professor of the practice of literary criticism.
  • And a surprising number of students explain their desire for a corporate job by drawing on the ethos of effective altruism: Whether they are conscious of the movement or not, they believe they can have greater impact by maximizing earnings to donate to a cause than working for that cause.
  • Roger Woolsey, executive director of the career center at Union College, a private liberal arts college in Schenectady, N.Y, said he first noticed a change around 2015, with students who had been in high school during the Great Recession and who therefore prioritized financial security.
  • that might be why students and their parents were much more focused on professional outcomes than they used to be. “In the past few years,” she said, “I’ve seen a higher level of interest in this first-destination data” — stats on what jobs graduates are getting out of college.
  • “The students saw what their parents went through, and the parents saw what happened to themselves,” he said. “You couple that with college tuition continuing to rise,” he continued, and students started looking for monetary payoffs right after graduation.
  • “Twenty years ago, an ‘introduction to investment banking’ event was held at the undergraduate library at Harvard,” said Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Forty students showed up, all men, and when asked to define ‘investment banking,’ none raised their hands.”
  • Now, according to Goldman Sachs, the bank had six times as many applicants this year for summer internships as it did 10 years ago, and was 20 percent more selective for this summer’s class than it was last year.
  • “Harvard is more diverse than ever before,” Mr. Contomanolis said, with nearly one in five students eligible for a low-income Pell Grant. Those students, he said, weigh whether to, for instance, “take a job back in my border town community in Texas and make a big impact in a kind of public service sense” or get a job with “a salary that would be life changing for my family.
  • according to The Harvard Crimson’s senior survey, as Mr. Barton noted in his opinion column, “The aggregate rate of ‘selling out’ is about the same — around 60 percent — for all income brackets.” The main distinction is that students from low-income families are comparatively more likely to go into technology than finance.
  • In other words, there is something additional at play, which Mr. Barton argues has to do with the nature of prestige. “If you tell me you’re working at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, that’s amazing, their eyes are going to light up,” Mr. Barton said. “If you tell somebody, ‘Oh, I took this random nonprofit job,’ or even a journalism job, even if you’re going to a huge name, it’s going to be a little bit of a question mark.”
  • “Even if you don’t want to do it for the rest of your life, it’s seen kind of as the golden standard of a smart, hardworking person,”
  • Matine Khalighi, 22, founded a nonprofit to award scholarships to homeless youth when he was in eighth grade. When he began studying economics at Harvard, his nonprofit, EEqual, was granting 50 scholarships a year. But some of the corporations that funded EEqual were contributing to inequality that created homelessness, he said. Philanthropy wasn’t the solution for systemic change, he decided. Instead, he turned to finance, with the idea that the sector could marshal capital quickly for social impact.
  • Part of that has to do with recruitment; the most prestigious banks and consulting firms do so only at certain colleges, and they have intensified their presence on those campuses in recent years. Over the last five years or so, “the idea of thinking about your professional path has moved much earlier in the undergraduate experience,” Ms. Ciesil said. She said the banks first began talking to students earlier, and it was the entrance of Big Tech onto the scene, asking for junior summer applications by the end of sophomore year, that accelerated recruitment timelines.
  • The marker that really distinguishes Gen Z is how pessimistic its members are, and how much they feel like life is beyond their control, according to Jean Twenge, a psychologist who analyzed data from national surveys of high school students and first-year college students in her book “Generations.”
  • Money, of course, helps give people a sense of control. And because of income inequality, “there’s this idea that you either make it or you don’t, so you better make it,” Ms. Twenge said.
  • Mihir Desai, a professor at Harvard’s business and law schools, wrote a 2017 essay in The Crimson titled “The Trouble With Optionality,” arguing that students who habitually pursue the security of prestigious employment foreclose the risk-taking and longer-range thinking necessary for more unusual or idealistic achievements.
  • Mr. Desai believes that’s often because they are responding to the bigger picture, like threats to workers from artificial intelligence, and political and financial upheaval.
  • he’s observed two trends among students pursuing wealth. There’s “the option-buyer,” the student who takes a job in finance or consulting to buy more time or to keep options open. Then there’s what he calls “the lottery ticket buyer,” the students who go all-in on a risky venture, like a start-up or new technology, hoping to make a windfall.
  • In the last five years, Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University and the former director of its Center for the Core Curriculum, has noticed a new trend when he asks students in his American Political Thought classes to consider their future.
  • “Almost every discussion, someone will come in and say, ‘Well, I can go and make a lot of money and do more good with that money than I could by doing some kind of charitable or service profession,’” Mr. Montás said. “It’s there constantly — a way of justifying a career that is organized around making money.”
  • Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”
  • But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”
Javier E

Steven Pinker's five-point plan to save Harvard from itself - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...versities-harvard-claudine-gay

plan university free speech academic freedom institutional neutrality non-violent viewpoint diversity DEI culture politics history policy

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.
  • I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.
  • Gay interpreted the question not at face value but as pertaining to whether Harvard students who had brandished slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” which many people interpret as tantamount to a call for genocide, could be prosecuted under Harvard’s policies. Though the slogans are simplistic and reprehensible, they are not calls for genocide in so many words. So even if a university could punish direct calls for genocide as some form of harassment, it might justifiably choose not to prosecute students for an interpretation of their words they did not intend.
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  • Nor can a university with a commitment to academic freedom prohibit all calls for political violence. That would require it to punish, say, students who express support for the invasion of Gaza knowing that it must result in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Thus Gay was correct in saying that students’ political slogans are not punishable by Harvard’s rules on harassment and bullying unless they cross over into intimidation, personal threats, or direct incitement of violence.
  • Gay was correct yet again in replying to Stefanik’s insistent demand, “What action has been taken against students who are harassing Jews on campus?” by noting that no action can be taken until an investigation has been completed. Harvard should not mete out summary justice like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: Sentence first, verdict afterward.
  • The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out)
  • Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos.
  • Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer.
  • In the wake of this debacle, the natural defense mechanism of a modern university is to expand the category of forbidden speech to include antisemitism (and as night follows day, Islamophobia). Bad idea
  • Deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear “hate speech.” Even the apparent no-brainer of prohibiting calls for genocide would backfire. Trans activists would say that opponents of transgender women in women’s sports were advocating genocide, and Palestinian activists would use the ban to keep Israeli officials from speaking on campus.
  • For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.
  • Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions.
  • So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.
  • Since universities are institutions with a mission of research and education, they are also entitled to controls on speech that are necessary to fulfill that mission. These include standards of quality and relevance: You can’t teach anything you want at Harvard, just like you can’t publish anything you want in The Boston Globe. And it includes an environment conducive to learning.
  • The events of this autumn also show that university pronouncements are an invitation to rancor and distraction. Inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded.
  • Nonviolence.
  • Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others. These goon tactics also violate the deepest value of a university, which is that opinions are advanced by reason and persuasion, not by force
  • Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative. Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class.
  • Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship.
  • The entrenchment of dogma is a hazard of policies that hire and promote on the say-so of faculty backed by peer evaluations. Though intended to protect departments from outside interference, the policies can devolve into a network of like-minded cronies conferring prestige on each other. Universities should incentivize departments to diversify their ideologies, and they should find ways of opening up their programs to sanity checks from the world outside.
  • Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.
  • An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.
  • Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
  • A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.
Javier E

The Truth About Harvard - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...3726

harvard education culture academia

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • the professor is not just a disinterested pedagogue. As a dispenser of grades he is a gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity professors face upward pressure from students ("I can't afford a B if I want to get into law school"); horizontal pressure from their colleagues, to which even Mansfield gave way; downward pressure from the administration ("If you want to fail someone, you have to be prepared for a very long, painful battle with the higher echelons," one professor told the Crimson); and perhaps pressure from within, from the part of them that sympathizes with students' careerism.
  • Not every class was so easy. Those that were tended to be in history and English, classics and foreign languages, art and philosophy—in other words, in those departments that provide what used to be considered the meat of a liberal arts education. Humanities students generally did the least work, got the highest grades, and cruised academically
  • the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once hypothesized that most professors oppose capitalism because they consider themselves far smarter than boobish businessmen, and therefore resent the economic system that rewards practical intelligence over their own gifts. I'm inclined to think that such resentment—at least in money-drunk America—increasingly coexists with a deep inferiority complex regarding modern capitalism, and a need, however unconscious, to justify academic life in the face of the fantastic accumulation of wealth that takes place outside the ivory tower.
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  • some areas of academic life aren't vulnerable to this crisis of confidence in the importance of one's work. Scientists can rest secure in the knowledge that their labors will help shove along the modern project of advancing health—and wealth.
  • Then there is economics, the new queen of the sciences—a discipline perfectly tailored to the modern market-driven university, and not coincidentally the most popular concentration
  • The humanities have no such reservoirs of confidence. And attempts by humanities professors to ape the rigor of their scientific colleagues have led to a decades-long wade in the marshes of postmodern academic theory, where canons are scorned, books exist only as texts to be deconstructed, and willfully obscure writing is championed over accessible prose. All this has merely reinforced capitalism's insistence that the sciences are the only important academic pursuits, because only they provide tangible, quantifiable (and potentially profitable) results. Far from making the humanities scientific, postmodernism has made them irrelevant.
  • The retreat into irrelevance is visible all across the humanities curriculum. Philosophy departments have largely purged themselves of metaphysicians and moralists; history departments emphasize exhaustive primary research and micro-history. In the field of English there is little pretense that literature is valuable in itself and should be part of every educated person's life, rather than serving as grist for endless academic debates
  • Sure, historians believe in their primary sources, English scholars in their textual debates, philosophers in their logic games. But many of them seem to believe that they have nothing to offer students who don't plan to be historians, or literary theorists, or philosophers. They make no effort to apply their work to what should be the most pressing task of undergraduate education: to provide a general education, a liberal arts education, to future doctors and bankers and lawyers and diplomats.
  • In this environment who can blame professors if, when it comes time to grade their students, they sometimes take the path of least resistance—the path of the gentleman's B-plus?
  • the Core's mission statement asserts, with a touch of smugness, that "the Core differs from other programs of general education. It does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information … rather, the Core seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education."
  • These words, which appear in the course catalogue each year, are the closest that Harvard comes to articulating an undergraduate educational philosophy. They suggest that the difference in importance between, say, "Democracy, Development, and Equality in Mexico" and "Reason and Faith in the West" (both offerings in Historical Study) does not matter. As the introduction to the history courses puts it, both courses offer a "historical" approach to knowledge that is presumably more valuable than mere "facts" about the past. Comprehending history "as a form of inquiry and understanding" trumps learning about actual events. The catalogue contains similarly pat introductions to the other disciplines. In each case the emphasis is squarely on methodology, not material.
  • The few Core classes that are well taught are swamped each year, no matter how obscure the subject matter. The closest thing to a Harvard education—that is, to an intellectual corpus that most Harvard graduates have in common—is probably obtained in such oversubscribed courses as "The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice," "First Nights: Five Performance Premieres," and "Fairy Tales, Children's Literature, and the Construction of Childhood."
  • As in a great library ravaged by a hurricane, the essential elements of a liberal arts education lie scattered everywhere at Harvard, waiting to be picked up. But little guidance is given on how to proceed with that task.
  • Harvard never attempted to answer that question—perhaps the most important question facing any incoming freshman. I chose my classes as much by accident as by design. There were times when some of them mattered to me, and even moments when I was intoxicated. But achieving those moments required pulling myself away from Harvard's other demands, whether social, extracurricular, or pre-professional, which took far more discipline than I was usually able to exert.
  • It was hard work to get into Harvard, and then it was hard work competing for offices and honors and extracurriculars with thousands of brilliant and driven young people; hard work keeping our heads in the swirling social world; hard work fighting for law-school slots and investment-banking jobs as college wound to a close … yes, all of that was heavy sledding. But the academics—the academics were another story.
  • What makes our age different is the moment that happened over and over again at Harvard, when we said This is going to be hard and then realized No, this is easy. Maybe it came when we boiled down a three-page syllabus to a hundred pages of exam-time reading, or saw that a paper could be turned in late without the frazzled teaching fellow's docking us, or handed in C-quality work and got a gleaming B-plus. Whenever the moment came, we learned that it wasn't our sloth alone, or our constant pushing for higher grades, that made Harvard easy. No, Harvard was easy because almost no one was pushing back.
Javier E

Opinion | Claudine Gay and the Limits of Social Engineering at Harvard - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-claudine-gay-resignation.html

affirmative action harvard academia justice racism engineering culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history.
  • How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
  • The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
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  • I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.
  • the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections
  • If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.
  • skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.
  • This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person
  • dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement.
  • It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color.
  • the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.
  • Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher ed — and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.
  • That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason
  • People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.
  • the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.
Javier E

Suing For An Affirmative End To Affirmative Action « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...tive-end-to-affirmative-action

affirmative action asians elite University race discrimination harvard

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The suit cites statistical evidence to claim that Harvard holds Asian applicants to a “far higher standard than other students” and that Harvard uses “racial classifications to engage in the same brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body.”
  • To get into the top schools, Asians need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.
  • discrimination against an entire race of students is simply unmistakable. Fixing it could be accomplished not at the expense of racial diversity, but in curtailing affirmative action for athletes and legacy admissions.
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  • In 2008, Asian Americans composed 27 percent of Harvard’s applicant pool, 46 percent of applicants who earned above 2200 on the SAT and 55 percent of those students who earned about 2300 and sent scores to Harvard. … “In light of Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies, [Asian Americans] are competing only against each other, and all other racial and ethnic groups are insulated from competing against high-achieving Asian Americans,”
  • Yes, the suits seek an end to all affirmative action. But the courts could provide a less extreme remedy that both gave Asian-American candidates a fair shake and kept a race-neutral way of encouraging diversity.
  • the argument that affirmative action is categorically illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act is simply wrong. Neither text explicitly forbids affirmative action. And it is illogical — not to mention ahistorical — to argue that racial classifications intended to promote diversity are the legal equivalent of racial classifications that sought to uphold a white supremacist caste system. Opponents of affirmative action are hardly underrepresented in the ordinary political process, and this is where they should make their case.
  • It may well be salutary for universities to experiment with different means of achieving a diverse student body. At least some may find formally race-neutral means that work well. What these lawsuits seek, however, is not merely to encourage experimentation but to forbid taking race into account altogether. That is a different story.
  • The way Jeff Yang sees it, this lawsuit isn’t really about helping Asians in the first place. After all, “Jane Dou” – as he calls the rejected Harvard hopeful – “didn’t end up at the center of the Harvard suit accidentally”: She was discovered through a broad-based campaign conducted by SFFA founder Edward Blum — a frustrated Republican congressional candidate who has chosen to make a career out of waging war on laws and policies that give “special privileges” to minorities.
  • What this lawsuit is really is just the latest attempt to derail an apparatus that has given hundreds of thousands of blacks, Hispanics and, yes, Asians a means to climb out of circumstances defined by our society’s historical racism.
Javier E

The Harvard Admissions Process Needs Reform - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...576136

harvard admissions college affirmative action

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Almost every student on campus is the subject of harsh appraisals based on how others assume they got in. The New York Times recently published an article about five freshmen friends at Harvard; one of them, the daughter of two Harvard alumni, was unsettled when a classmate “contrasted people who were ‘super qualified to be here’ with legacies.” Assumptions about affirmative action have led other observers to perceive Harvard’s many black and Hispanic students as beneficiaries of lowered admissions standards, rather than students who are themselves “super qualified to be here.”
  • In fact, the only students who aren’t vulnerable to assumptions of underqualification are Asian. The heartless assumption about Asian Americans at highly selective colleges is that they are, if anything, overqualified—academic beasts of burden, whose strange willingness to work endlessly makes them a vast group of curve-busters, who disappear into the hard sciences and are never heard from again until you need a knee replacement or a shunt in your brain.
  • he lawsuit has thrust many facts into the public view that Harvard would have liked to keep secret. An internal investigation conducted in 2013 concluded that the admissions process was biased against Asians, yet the admissions office never did anything to remedy the fact. Previously confidential notes made by admissions officers reveal that many Asian students were torpedoed because of low scores in the squishy category of personal qualities; these notes suggested that many Asians just aren’t the right kind of people for Harvard—not enough self-expression, norm-breaking, insouciance. “Would she relax and have any fun?” was written on the application of one high-achieving female student, which seems both racist and sexist
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  • et the larger lesson be this: The entire, time-honored way of doing admissions at Harvard and its peer institutions is unsustainable. What could be more elitist—more paternalistic—than a black-box process from which life-changing, final decisions are rendered based on a system that more or less comes down to: Just trust us? How can a process meant to democratize an institution still valorize the children of wealth and privilege? If the system is broadly understood to make right its manifold past failings regarding race and privilege, how can it justify admitting Asian Americans at a lower rate than any other cohort?
nrashkind

Activists Disrupt Harvard-Yale Rivalry Game To Protest Climate Change : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...game-to-protest-climate-change

shared by nrashkind on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The annual Harvard-Yale football game was delayed for almost an hour on Saturday as climate change activists rushed the field at the end of halftime.
  • Unfurling banners with slogans like "Nobody wins. Yale and Harvard are complicit in climate injustice,"
  • Clad in winter coats and hats, about 150 students sprawled around the 50-yard line at Yale Bowl as loudspeaker announcements and police demanded protesters leave the field.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • As protesters clapped and chanted "disclose, divest and reinvest,
  • Harvard senior Caleb Schwartz, one of the protest organizers who was arrested on Saturday, told NPR the mood on the field was joyful, despite the possibility of arrest.
  • "That moment, when we saw people running onto the field was just really incredible," he said
  • "We know that we don't have a lot of time to act to curb the effects of climate change, and the longer it takes for our universities to acknowledge their role in the climate crisis and accept responsibility,
  • Schwartz says the Harvard-Yale rivalry game has been played since 1875, and organizers knew alumni from all over the world would be tuning in.
  • "We will win this fight, and we will get the university to divest,"
  • Harvard and Yale are not the first universities to face criticism over fossil fuel investments.
  • The first campus divestment movements started at Swarthmore College in 2011.
  • "Yale stands firmly for the right to free expression.
  • Today, students from Harvard and Yale expressed their views and delayed the start of the second half of the football game
  • Saturday's protest during a marque rivalry football game attracted widespread attention, including tweets of support from several Democratic presidential candidates including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
  • The protest garnered so much interest, that Schwartz changed his bus ticket back to Cambridge on Saturday so he could stay and field the deluge of media inquiries.
  • In a statement, the student groups behind the protest, Fossil Free Yale, the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition and Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, wrote:
  • News organizations and journalists' advocates are challenging restrictive new ground rules for reporters assigned to cover the Senate impeachment trial.
  • Correspondents who submit to an official credentialing process are granted broad access throughout the Capitol complex and usually encounter few restrictions in talking with members of Congress or others.
  • now Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger has imposed new requirements for the impeachment trial,
  • Reporters are being confined to small cordoned-off sections in areas where unrestricted access was typically standard.
  • They are being prevented from walking with senators to continue conversations — even when the senator involved is willingly participating.
  • Taken together, the new rules effectively prevent members of the press from reaching many senators.
  • Elsewhere, as in the White House or the State Department, for example, reporters' movements are controlled more closely, and access to principals can be severely limited.
  • Stenger and the Capitol Police may fear that the additional attention drawn to the Senate impeachment trial may increase risks to members of Congress.
  • Nearly 60 news organizations including NPR signed a letter organized by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press on Thursday urging Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to relax the new restrictions on reporters.
  • Patricia Gallagher Newberry, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, faulted the new Senate restrictions because they deny reporters the ability to fully cover a once-in-a-generation spectacle.
  • "These restrictions set a horrible precedent and reinforce the lie that the news media is dangerous and the 'enemy of the people
  • News organizations that assign correspondents to the Capitol — including NPR — are continuing to negotiate ground rules with Stenger (the sergeant-at-arms) and the Capitol Police.
  • Reporters Challenge New Restrictions In Trying To Cover Senate Impeachment Trial
Javier E

The Liberal Maverick Fighting Race-Based Affirmative Action - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...enberg-affirmative-action.html

maverick liberal race class admissions

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • The paper inspired him to write his influential 1996 book, “The Remedy,” which developed his theory that affirmative action had set back race relations by becoming a source of racial antagonism.
  • “If you want working-class white people to vote their race, there’s probably no better way to do it than to give explicitly racial preferences in deciding who gets ahead in life,” he said. “If you want working-class whites to vote their class, you would try to remind them that they have a lot in common with working-class Black and Hispanic people.”
  • Today, as in the mid-1990s, polls show that a majority of people oppose race-conscious college admissions, even as they support racial diversity. Public opinion may not always be right, Mr. Kahlenberg said, but surely it should be considered when developing public policy.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.
  • His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.
  • elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues.
  • his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.
  • In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards.
  • In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.
  • The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.
  • In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.
  • Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said
  • Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)
  • There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”
  • In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”
redavistinnell

Social Club at Harvard Rejects Calls to Admit Women, Citing Risk of Sexual Misconduct -... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...risk-of-sexual-misconduct.html

social club harvard calls new york new york times

shared by redavistinnell on 15 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Social Club at Harvard Rejects Calls to Admit Women, Citing Risk of Sexual Misconduct
  • This week, that silence was broken when an official with the group, the Porcellian Club, said that admitting women could increase the chances of sexual misconduct.
  • “Forcing single-gender organizations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease, the potential for sexual misconduct,
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Harvard has a long tradition of all-male social clubs. In 1984, the university required these clubs to admit women. At that point, the clubs broke official ties with Harvard, and they remain unrecognized by the university.
  • Last year, the Fox Club and the Spee Club opened their doors to women. But six clubs, including the Porcellian, still admit only men.
  • Harvard College’s dean, Rakesh Khurana — who said in a statement that the single-sex clubs were “at odds with the aspirations of the 21st-century society” — was set to meet with graduate leaders of the groups, known as final clubs, on Wednesday for one in a series of discussions he has held with club members and alumni.
  • According to The Crimson, Mr. Storey said in his letter that sexual assault was not a problem at the Porcellian and that the club had become a “scapegoat.
  • Some students said they did not understand why the Porcellian had inserted itself into the discussion, because it does not host parties and keeps a low profile.
  • “I think the fact that women aren’t allowed in their clubhouse has nothing to do with it, and I think that was a pretty dumb thing to say,” Ms. Bishai said, adding that she has a number of close friends who are in final clubs.
  • “a really troubling sentiment, and I think it’s a really dangerous idea that men- and women-identified people can’t be in the same space and behave with equal respect and regard for one another.”
Javier E

Carole Hooven On Harvard's Existential Crisis - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...hooven-on-harvards-existential

harvard crisis university education culture politics woke DEI excellence

shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • The most salutary aspect of this whole affair is that it has really helped expose the core disagreement in our current culture war. One side believes, as I do, that individual merit exists, and should be the core criterion for admission to a great university, regardless of an individual’s racial or sexual identity, and so on. The other side believes that merit doesn’t exist at all outside the oppressive paradigm of racial and sexual identity, and that membership in a designated “marginalized” group should therefore be the core criterion for advancement in academia.
  • so they discriminate against individuals on the grounds of their race before they consider merit.
  • For example: If you are black and in the fourth lowest decile of SATs and GPAs among Harvard applicants, you have a higher chance of getting into Harvard (12.8 percent admitted) than an Asian-American in the very top decile (12.7 admitted). It’s rigged, which is why it was shut down by SCOTUS.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • there is no debate. There’s a trade-off. But once you make identity a core qualification, you’re opening up a whole world of racist anti-racism.
  • Most Americans believe in individual merit, and advancement regardless of identity. Harvard and our new elite believe that our society is so structured as an enduring “white supremacy” that merit can only be considered after you have accounted for the effects of “intersectional oppression.”
  • each moment of truth puts a crack in the stifling, authoritarian edifice of DEI. We can bring this corruption to light. We can hold them to account. I’m certainly more hopeful about the future of liberal society now than I was a month ago.
  • the only way to cover it all up, of course, is to abolish testing students entirely (which is what so many elite colleges and universities are now doing) or to give all students an A or an A-, making any distinctions of excellence irrelevant.
  • When push comes to shove, when there is a finite number of places available, you’re in a zero-sum predicament. You have to pick between a smarter student of the wrong race and a weaker student of the right race. In the end at Harvard, being in the right race — not merit — determines your chances.
  • The more people see this for the systemic racism it is, the sooner we can throw this neo-Marxist cuckoo out of the liberal nest, and return to the airing of all ideas, regardless of the subject matter or the identity of the students
  • That’s how you can claim, as Gay does, that “diversity” and “excellence” go hand in hand, when obviously, at some point they can and do conflict.
  • The response to all this from the CRT crowd has been to insist — ever more strongly — that Gay is simply and only a victim of racism, or, in woke terminology, a victim of misogynoir. The fact that a white female university president at those same hearings lost her job before Gay did — and without any plagiarism questions — doesn’t count.
  • In the Congressional hearings, moreover, she showed little gravitas, grace, or ability to think on her feet. She has largely hidden from public view since the plagiarism revelations — not a good instinct for a leader of a huge, public-facing institution like Harvard. She is, quite obviously, a run-of-the-mill woke academic, who was promoted at breakneck speed because of her race and sex, and found herself quickly out of her depth.
  • When you look instead at what she has done as an administrator, which is where she has been focused more recently, you see it has almost all been about hiring on the basis of sex and race, persecuting heretical members of racial minorities, and removing paintings of dead white dudes. She is, at least, consistent.
  • And let’s be honest: we can all see with our own eyes that subordinating merit to race and sex is how Gay got her position. Her work, beyond the sloppy dime-store plagiarism, would be underwhelming for an average member of any faculty in the country. But for a Harvard president, it’s astonishingly mid
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Trump Wants to Be Impeached. So Do It Now. - 0 views

nymag.com/...be-impeached-so-do-it-now.html

trump impeachment harvard admissions discrimination diversity inequality

shared by Javier E on 04 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Why would a president say such things? And in public? My view, for what it’s worth, is that Trump’s pathological narcissism overrides reality on a minute-by-minute basis, and that because of this, the very idea of the rule of law, which makes no distinction between the really stable geniuses and everybody else, is impossible for Trump to understand
  • Looking at his long and abysmal business career, the rule of law was always, always an object of scorn, something only suckers cared about and lawyers were paid to circumvent. For Trump, the law is something to break, avoid or pay off. And as president, he clearly believes he is above it.
  • narcissism is no defense. Delusional mania and paranoia are no defenses eithe
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • This is an open assault on the integrity of U.S. elections and the rule of law by the president himself. We need no more investigations or even hearings. We already have irrefutable proof. The suspect has confessed. Some detail and background might be discovered by interviewing witnesses, but the core case is in our hands. An attempt to get a foreign power to intervene in an internal election process is definitionally an impeachable offense. It was precisely the fear of foreign interference that prompted much of the founders’ discussion of impeachment
  • How wonderful it would be if Harvard’s goal in these discriminatory practices were to get Harvard students to think “beyond race” and to see one another as unique individuals.
  • It would still be a contradiction, of course — to combat racial discrimination, you need to practice racial discrimination — but as a temporary measure, you can justify it if the goal is eventual color-blindness in admissions.
  • one of the benefits of subjecting Harvard to discovery in this trial was the revelation that a whopping 43 percent of white students at Harvard are legacy and special admissions, i.e. there because they’re athletes, legacies, Dean’s List, or children of faculty. Of those, 70 percent would not be there on merit alone.
  • if Harvard has its way, we won’t. Increasingly, the popular rationale for the discrimination is as Murray described it in the New York Times this week, “an appropriate remedy for longtime systemic, state-sanctioned oppression.”
  • Harvard has long since stopped pretending — at least when it doesn’t have to defend its practices in court — that it believes in bringing about a society “beyond race.
  • In the last decade, the emphasis is on racial oppression as a permanent structural force built into America’s DNA. Affirmative action is thereby a form of open-ended resistance to “white supremacy.” All students, far from getting beyond race, are required to be constantly conscious of it even in a casual conversation
  • Diversity programs are increasingly not about getting past race; they are about insisting on its eternal centrality to everything in America.
  • So in nine years we can get rid of this bias?
  • If you ended this affirmative action for the super-rich and connected, you’d free up almost a full third of admissions. It’s win-win! More fairness and more racial balance
Javier E

Harvard and M.I.T. Offer Free Online Courses - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...offer-free-online-courses.html

online learning harvard

shared by Javier E on 03 May 12 - Cached
  • Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite universities planning to offer free massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.
  • The technology for online education, with video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.
  • M.I.T. and Harvard officials said they would use the new online platform not just to build a global community of online learners, but also to research teaching methods and technologies.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • if I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course.”
  • The edX project will include not only engineering courses, in which computer grading is relatively simple, but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software. Coursera will also offer free humanities courses in which grading will be done by peers.
  • “What faculty don’t want to do is just take something off the shelf that’s somebody else’s and teach it, any more than they would take a textbook, start on Page 1, and end with the last chapter,” he said. “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.”
  • anonymous on 11 May 12
     
    I think that Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, UP, and Michigan have a great idea in establishing these free online courses. When such high level courses are provided online and for free, there really is no excuse not to pursue greater knowledge. The only ingredient not provided is self-motivation. After both sites, Coursera seems to be developing much more rapidly then edX. Coursera is constantly updating their site with new courses. Also, after sifting through a few of the courses offered, I noticed that many teachers are willing to stream some online students in through video conferencing. These online students can virtually interact with their counterparts in the classroom at the given elite university. In other words, the intimate relationship found through interacting with other students and professors in a classroom setting is not completely lost.
Javier E

Delba Winthrop on Aristotle and Democracy | Harvard Magazine - 0 views

www.harvardmagazine.com/...arvey-mansfield-delba-winthrop

democracy aristotle philosophy harvard

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • I supervised this dissertation and knew it was something terrific, but I doubted it could be published because it was so terse and so far from the mainstream. It had received the Leo Strauss Award from the American Political Science Association as the best dissertation in political philosophy in 1974, but this was a citation of contested value for those who disagreed with Leo Strauss. Nonetheless, I tried to get her to revise it for publication during her lifetime, and she always refused, saying she needed to know more Aristotle (an infinite task). Then, 10 years after she died and at the urging of friends, I put it up at Chicago (my publisher for the most part), and to my great surprise, it sailed through, praised to the skies. It would have been more Harvard if this Harvard dissertation were being published by Harvard University Press, but it’s an honor that the Harvard government department will appreciate.  And it ought to cause a commotion among Aristotle scholars, as well as start waves that ought to reach the wider circles of thoughtful citizens in democracies. These are two “oughts” of the kind that in our age of haste sometimes takes time to be fulfilled.What does Delba Winthrop find and propose?
  • She punctures the complacency with which we defend democracy as the best or even the only legitimate form of government, and turns to Aristotle for justification of democracy. In Aristotle’s day and in ours, democrats want inclusiveness; they want above all to include everyone as part of a whole. But what is a whole?
  • The assertive quality of political speech, the argumentative character of argument, is shown to have a crucial role in philosophy itself, where human reason must claim its due as a contribution to the whole of the universe. Political science has the double task of teaching citizens how to include everyone and of teaching those who want to understand the thought that sustains democracy.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This is a question for both politics and philosophy, and Winthrop shows that Aristotle pursues the answer in his Politics. She uncovers his insights into politics from philosophy, and even more his insights into philosophy from politics.
  • Her interpretation begins with the difficult ambiguities in Aristotle’s text and explains them as necessary to his meaning, not accidents in the supposed notes of his students.  Her stated motto is, “Nothing is so obscure that it is not meant to be found,” and this guides her penetrating imagination to many hints hitherto unnoticed or dismissed in the text. Hers is an interpretation in the fullest sense, so much that—at least for the Politics—readers will have the sensation of having entered a new realm of surprising coherence and exactness
  • Winthrop wants to restore the eminence Aristotle once enjoyed that has been forgotten, more often than knowingly rejected, by modern philosophers and political scientists
Javier E

Opinion | How Long Can Democracy Survive QAnon and Its Allies? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democracy-qanon.html

electoral system democracy government US reform

shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • “The central weakness of our political system now is the Republican Party,” Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard, said in an interview with Vox on Jan. 13, a week after the storming of the Capitol.
  • “The American Republican Party looks like a European far-right party,” Ziblatt continued. “But the big difference between the U.S. and a lot of these European countries is that the U.S. only has two parties and one of them is like a European far-right party. If the G.O.P. only controlled 20 percent of the legislature, like you see in a lot of European countries, this would be far less problematic — but they basically control half of it.”
  • A central question, then, is how distant from the rest of the American electorate the voters who align themselves with the radical wing of the Republican Party are.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • They found that “at least 60 percent of them are white, Christian and male. Further, around half are retired, over 65 years of age, and earn at least $50K per year. Finally, roughly 30 percent have at least a college degree.” More than 50 percent were born at a time of white hegemony, before the civil rights and women’s rights movements and the sexual revolution.
  • whether Trump “bears responsibility for the Capitol riot.” They found that “barely 30 percent of these respondents believe Trump bears any responsibility whatsoever,” and, of those, more than half said Trump bears “a little” responsibility.
  • Not only are these voters partisan, the authors note, but “when we asked our respondents about whether or not they agreed with Trump’s fraud claims, 98 percent believed them valid.”
  • “75 percent of Americans believe that Trump bears at least some responsibility” for the Jan. 6 mob attack on Congress. Among all Republicans, “this figure declines significantly to 52 percent.”
  • These MAGA supporters, who were recruited after signaling sympathy for the movement on Facebook, were rock-solid Republicans, Blum and Parker found, voting at or near 100 percent for the party’s House and Senate candidates in 2018 and 2020, and for Trump last year. They are far more engaged in politics — contributing money, going to meetings and volunteering — than the average American. “By any metric, this group appears committed to the political process,” Blum and Parker wrote.
  • Should Trump be “charged with the crime of inciting a riot?” All adults: yes 54, no 43. Republicans: yes 12, no 84.
  • Along similar lines, a Washington Post/ABC News survey taken Jan. 10-13 demonstrated how the views of a majority of Republicans stand far apart from the views of a majority of Americans.
  • Asked if Trump has acted “responsibly” or “irresponsibly” since the Nov. 3 election, the 1002 adults polled chose “irresponsibly” by 66-30. Republicans, in contrast, chose “responsibly” by 66-29.
  • It would come at a cost: more government instability as potential coalition allies jockey over cabinet posts, a particular issue or a budget item. It would also give the far ends of the political spectrum continuous formal representation in the political system. The Trumps could more easily realize their goal of becoming the Le Pens of America.
  • Using their accusations almost as a lingua franca, a way to identify the like-minded, MAGA partisans and followers of QAnon signal one another by alleging that pedophile rings seek to wrest control of government or by alleging that school shootings were staged by leftists to win passage of gun control. They evoke a world in which unknown forces pull the levers of government, where nothing is as it seems to be. Professing your belief in claims like these attests to MAGA loyalties while expressing — in an arcane, politicized shorthand — your fervent opposition to liberalism and racial and cultural change
  • In contrast, they wrote, “roughly 95 percent of MAGA supporters believe Antifa — the left wing protest group — bears some responsibility for the riots,” with more than 85 percent agreeing that Antifa bears “a great deal” or “a lot” of responsibility.
  • Drutman wrote that he has “come to realize how much of an existential threat the current Republican Party is to the continuation of America democracy.” A two-party democracy cannot survive “for very long if one of two dominant parties gives up on the foundational institution of democracy: free and fair elections, in which all votes count equally.”
  • I’ve also come to appreciate how much democracy depends on a conservative party that believes in democracy, and thus how important it is to create electoral institutions in this moment that will allow the currently-marginalized small “l” liberal Republicans to separate from the MAGA wing of the party and still win some representation in the Congress.
  • Proportional representation, he argued “is the only way to break up the current Republican coalition and free the pro-democracy forces within the Republican Party to compete on their own.”
  • Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, plans to reintroduce The Fair Representation Act, which would, if enacted, put into place many of the reforms Drutman supports. Beyer wrote on his website that the measurewould move U.S. House elections into multi-member districts drawn by independent redistricting commissions and elected through ranked choice voting. The multi-member districts would be effective in states apportioned six or more seats in the House, and would elect three to five Representatives each, depending on the size of the state. Taken together, these three measures would incentivize congressional candidates to appeal to a broader range of voters.
  • Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard who examined different levels of dissatisfaction in democratic countries in “Is Western Democracy Backsliding?” finds evidence supportive of Drutman’s argument:Parliamentary democracies with PR elections and stable multiparty coalition governments, typical of the Nordic region, generate a broader consensus about welfare policies addressing inequality, exclusion, and social justice, and this avoids the adversarial winner-take-all divisive politics and social inequality more characteristic of majoritarian systems.
  • I would prefer ranked-choice voting with some multi-member districts for state and national legislatures, and proportional representation (by state popular vote, not by Congressional district which are already gerrymandered) for the Electoral College.” These, she wrote, “could all be accomplished with just legislative change, no constitutional amendments.
  • Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, said by email that “a PR system would be political suicide for the parties.” Why, he asked, “would either party — let alone both — want to change?”
  • Several political scholars and strategists argue that the fault lies in our political system, that the unique way America has combined its government structure with the mechanics of its elections serves to exacerbate conflict in a deeply polarized country. These scholars have produced a variety of proposals, many involving the creation of multi-member congressional districts and the encouragement of proportional representation to replace the current single district, winner-take-all system.
  • a separate 2019 survey by Echelon Insights, a survey research firm, that asked voters “Suppose the Democratic and Republican Parties were replaced by a new set of political parties. Which of these parties would you be most likely to support?”
  • A center-left party committed to putting “the middle class first, pass universal health insurance, strengthen labor unions, and raise taxes on the wealthy to support programs for those less well off” amassed 28 percent.A green party with a platform calling for passage of “a Green New Deal to build a carbon-free economy with jobs for all, break up big corporations, end systemic inequality, and promote social and economic justice” picked up 10 percent.
  • A traditional-right party, committed to “defend the American system of free enterprise, promote traditional family,” won 21 percent.A culturally liberal and globalist party with a platform committed to “advance social progress including women’s rights and LGBTQ rights, to work with other countries through free trade and diplomacy, to cut the deficit, and reform capitalism with sensible regulation” gathered 12 percent.
  • The firm gave respondents five choices,A nationalist-right party promising to “stop illegal immigration, put America First, stand up to political correctness” attracted 19 percent.
Javier E

Opinion | At Harvard, Affirmative Action Shouldn't Be Just Black and White - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mative-action-harvard-unc.html

affirmative action scouts decision history policy

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • It’s not that I oppose affirmative action per se; boosting opportunities for members of a historically disadvantaged group as a means of reparation and social justice seems to me easily morally justifiable.
  • nothing so defensible has been playing out in the admissions offices of the most selective American universities.
  • The voluminous record in the cases brought against Harvard and U.N.C. suggest that in order to maintain a vaguely defined notion of “diversity,” the schools’ admissions officials bumped up the chances primarily of Black and Hispanic applicants by undermining opportunities of another historically disadvantaged racial group — Asian Americans.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • As The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang writes, elite colleges’ affirmative action programs seemed “designed for a racially binary America” and “never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy.” He argues that much of the public debate about the court’s decision seems stuck in that binary, too.
  • As Roberts and Gorsuch observe, these categories are in some ways too broad and in other ways too narrow
  • Perhaps the fundamental problem with these schools’ policies is their limited conception of the capacious and fluid nature of racial identity.
  • at Harvard, U.N.C. and other colleges that use the common admissions application, applicants are asked to choose one or more options from a list “to explain ‘how you identify yourself.’ The available choices are American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; Hispanic or Latino; or White,” adding, “Applicants can write in further details if they choose.”
  • He’s right. As I followed the case, it was this outdatedness that stuck in my craw
  • I will note a couple of points to undercut the liberal justices’ worry: First, it’s worth remembering that the decision’s impact is limited — as the sociologists Richard Arum and Mitchell Stevens argued recently in The Times, affirmative action mattered most for only a small group of the most selective colleges
  • Where do these categories come from? Gorsuch puts it pithily: “Bureaucrats.
  • Another instance of confusion came during oral argument, when U.N.C.’s attorney was asked which box a person from Jordan, Iraq, Iran or Egypt should check. He said he didn’t know, which seemed a pretty revealing answer: If U.N.C. doesn’t know what race a person of Middle Eastern descent is, should it really be making decisions based on race?
  • according to the American government, there is a correct answer to this question: Although some Arab American groups have lobbied to change the designation, people of Middle Eastern descent are officially classified as white.
  • the records suggests that Harvard also treated racial categories quite like stereotypes: Applicants of Asian descent were more likely than members of other racial categories to be labeled “standard strong,” meaning that admissions personnel determined they were academically qualified but otherwise unremarkable
  • Asian Americans scored better than other groups on academic and extracurricular measures, but Harvard’s admissions officers consistently gave Asians lower “personal” ratings than members of other groups. Harvard’s use of such subjective criteria to curb the number of Asian students admitted smacked of its efforts a century ago to keep out Jewish applicants it deemed unworthy of its “character and fitness” standards.
  • In dissent, the three liberal justices argued persuasively that the court’s ruling might significantly reduce enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at elite colleges. I agree this is a serious concern
  • Ignore if you can the ugly stereotyping — how the perfect SAT score would have been more impressive if the student had been “brown,” how “of course” it was an Asian kid who did so well, even if “still” impressive — and note the racial confusion: According to the colleges’ own categories, Asian includes brown people from, or whose forebears hailed from, the Indian subcontinent. But apparently U.N.C.’s officers’ mental picture didn’t match their official racial boxes.
  • The ruling presents us with another opportunity, too: To think about race more realistically, with far more specificity and precision. The 2020 census showed that America is growing more multiracial and more ethnically and racially diverse. We are far more than six categories on a demographic form — we contain multitudes, and we should recognize them.
  • “The ruling provides America with an opportunity to redirect the conversation from a relatively small number of schools and instead direct urgently needed attention to the vast middle and lower tiers of postsecondary education,” they wrote.
Javier E

Opinion | The Republican Party's Problem With the Elite Begins With Its Own - The New Y... - 0 views

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GOP anti-intellectualism elite culture crisis politics ivy league

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  • This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding. In order to stay in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers.
  • Remember, Ron DeSantis once eagerly joined one of Yale’s secret societies and told classmates he’d dreamed of attending Harvard Law. He founded a tutoring firm offering “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.
  • But once in office, he made a show of distancing himself from his academic credentials.
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  • “I viewed having earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School to be political scarlet letters as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” DeSantis wrot
  • His Ivy League brethren, Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law) and Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), take similar pains to wash off the taint of East Coast academia with good-ol’-boy cred.
  • The latest standard-bearer for regular-folk Republicans is a down-home J.D., now JD — no periods, dude — who went to Yale Law School only with the help of student loans and side jobs. What’s more, JD Vance first got a humbler degree at Ohio State through the G.I. Bill. At the Republican National Convention, Yale barely came up.
  • Gone is the bushy-tailed Vance who wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” “The coolest thing I’ve done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School, something 13-year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous.” The up-and-comer who, in thrall of Yale’s “aura,” confessed that he “wanted to go to Yale more than any other school.”
  • The Vance who emerged as a MAGA politician is one who, after reaping the benefits and connections of an elite graduate education, turned around and gave a speech in 2021 called “The Universities Are the Enemy.”“How ridiculous is it that we tell our young people to go to college, to get brainwashed?” he asked the crowd, going on to quote Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.” For Vance, the biggest takeaway from his Ivy League education is the monumental chip on his shoulder.
  • he Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.
Javier E

How to weasel your kid into an elite college without paying bribes - The Washington Post - 0 views

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elite college admission scandal inequality

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • It’s a textbook case of entitlement, closely intertwined with a logic that undermines affirmative action. For while children from wealthy families float to college on rafts of invisible advantages that we pretend are talents, minority kids are constantly told that they don’t really deserve to be there. 
  • the students who come in through the “front door” at elite colleges, by simply applying and being accepted, have also often bought their way in.
  • Rich parents spend millions on their children to make them “better” than others
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  • Parents deploy their wealth to make their children look interesting and have the right “talents.” It works: Children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend elite colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent.  
  • For the super-rich, the legal scam of buying your child a spot at an elite school through, say, giving a building is a secret so open it’s hardly a secret at all
  • I spoke to someone who’d worked in development at a boarding school that had long served as a feeder to the Ivy League. At the time he told me that to get into an Ivy school, you need to give about $5 million.
  • They may not even be able to talk about this: It’s become standard to require admissions officers to sign nondisclosure agreements. 
  • Kushner has objected that he graduated from Harvard with honors, but since about 90 percent of his class did, too, that hardly proves he was more deserving of admission than people whose families didn’t have $2.5 million to give. 
  • while Harvard accepted about 11 percent of applicants in the late 1990s, when Kushner was admitted (the admission rate is lower now), more than half of the members of the Harvard Committee on University Resources — made up of some of the school’s biggest donors — had children then at the university, and many had sent more than one there.
  • Based on my research, I’d bet that there are orders of magnitude more students at elite colleges who took the “philanthropy” route to admission rather than the bribery one.
  • the true tragedy is that almost all rich families buy their kids into elite colleges by purchasing advantages they pass off as talents, whether by way of sailing lessons or elaborate vacations planned with an eye on admissions essays. We view these vastly overrepresented children of the rich as having earned their spots. And that’s the great American delusion we call “meritocracy.” 
  • My parents gave me a lot I’m enormously grateful for: violin lessons that cost thousands of dollars a year, trips to museums and sites in foreign countries. My boarding-school classmates enjoyed much more: prestigious unpaid internships, interview coaching and tutors who helped with the work of every class.
  • This is the real scandal. The 1 percent — more than 1 million American households — have more and more money, and they’re using huge sums so their children can get a leg up on the rest
  • Those students escape questions about whether they deserve to be there, unlike people who benefit from programs like affirmative action, which could help moderate those advantages. Instead of thinking about this as a problem inherent in the system, we call it the virtue of meritocracy. And we look to the poor and middle classes and ask, “Why aren’t you more talented?”
julia rhodes

Echoes of Palestinian partition in Syrian refugee crisis | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

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palestinian refugee crisis policy history politics syria

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  • With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c
  • Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.
  • The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.
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  • A Dec. 13 Amnesty International report calls the Syrian refugee crisis an international failure, but this regional crisis necessitates a regional response — one that more systematically offers Syrian refugees legal protections. The Amnesty report rightly points out that it is not just the European Union that is failing the refugees. It is the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council that, in spite of their wealth and support for the military action in Syria, have not offered any resettlement or humanitarian admission places to refugees from Syria. 
  • After World War II, the European refugee crisis blotted out other partition crises across the globe as colonial powers withdrew in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Partitions at the time were about questions of borders and the forced un-mixing of populations.
  • The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees — the international legal framework for the protection of refugees, which obligated states to not return refugees to their countries of origin (non-refoulement), to respect refugees’ basic human rights and to grant them freedoms equivalent to those enjoyed by foreign nationals living legally in the country — did not include those displaced from partitioned countries in its definition of a refugee.
  • Today, this largely leaves Syrian refugees entering those countries without legal recourse. It is also the most dangerous injustice that Syrian refugees face.
  • Turkey is heeding the call. In April it enacted a law establishing the country’s first national asylum system providing refugees with access to Turkish legal aid
  • The origins of the Middle East’s stagnation lie in the partition of Palestine in 1948. When half a million Arab refugees fled Jewish-held territory, seeking refuge in neighboring states, countries like Lebanon and Saudi Arabia moved to stop them. In the final days of the drafting of the United Nation General Assembly’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the war in Palestine raging, Saudi Arabia persuaded many countries, including the U.S., to dilute the obligation of a state to grant asylum. The Middle Eastern countries feared that they would be required to absorb Palestinians and that Palestinians might lose a right of return to what is now Israel.
  • I am heartened by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ recent call not just for financial and humanitarian assistance and emergency development in the Middle East to aid Syria but also for legal protection for refugees.
  • Bangkok Principles on the Status and Treatment of Refugees. Formally adopted in 2001, the principles provide for a right of return, a broader definition of a refugee and a mandate that countries take up the responsibility of determining refugee status based on rule of law.
  • With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers.
  • what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies.
  • The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland.
Grace Gannon

From a Rwandan Dump to the Halls of Harvard - 0 views

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Harvard Rwanda charity worker genocide

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  • Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14
     
    Justus Uwayesu was orphaned by ethnic genocide at nine years old and lived in a car in a Rwandan garbage dump. He begged for money and scrounged for food. Clare Effiong, an American charity worker, visited the dump one day, and Justus made his ambitions very clear, stating, "I want to go to school." Through hard work and motivation to escape the slum community he lived in, he got his wish. He now attends Harvard on a full scholarship, studying math, economics, and human rights.
Javier E

Capitalism in crisis: U.S. billionaires worry about the survival of the system that mad... - 0 views

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capitalism survival automation rich reform revolution crisis politics radical

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  • In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.
  • Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country’s economic future and were looking for someone to blame.
  • Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and anger in the country would continue to grow. “It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” Larsen said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger.
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  • in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.
  • “It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.
  • Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
  • One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it
  • “Winners Take All,” a book by Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and former McKinsey consultant, that had hit the bestseller list and was provoking heated arguments in places like Silicon Valley, Davos and Harvard Business School. Giridharadas’s book was a withering attack on America’s billionaire class and the notion that America’s iconic capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve big social and economic problems that have eluded a plodding and divided government.
  • For many of the students, schooled in the notion that business could make a profit while making the world a better place, Giridharadas’s ideas were both energizing and disorienting. Erika Uyterhoeven, a second-year student, recalled one of her fellow classmates turning to her when Giridharadas was finished. “So, what should we do?” her colleague asked. “Is he saying we shouldn’t go into banking or consulting?
  • Added another student: “There was a palpable sense of personal desperation.”
  • “The best thing that happened to me was that I lost my 2014 election,” he said. “Had I won . . . maybe I would’ve been a traditional neoliberal. It really forced my self-reflection and it pointed out every weakness I ever had.”
  • Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.
  • some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.
  • thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live
  • To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,”
  • The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,’ ” he said
  • Khanna had a different view. He saw the country’s problems primarily as the product of growing income inequality and a lack of opportunity.
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